Setting Intentions of Love
On some mornings, I will do yoga as my exercise, either at an in-person yoga class or with a video online. I am not very flexible, but it does help keep my joints moving, and I think it’s good for me to move daily in some way. In most of the classes, the instructor will give a moment for us to “set an intention” for the day’s practice of yoga.
I love the idea of setting an intention for that specific time, but nearly always my mental response is somewhat cheeky: “my intention is don’t die.” I mean it figuratively - I’m not worried about physical death, I just want to make it through the session. “Don’t die” is my way of saying that I’d like to keep up and not have the movements be too fast or too bendy. Of course, since I’m the one who decided to do the yoga, I usually come up with a truer and less flippant response.
I love intentionality. I like thinking about the reasons we do something because the examination is illuminating. Sometimes the answer is that we’ve fallen into the routine of doing it and we can’t remember why we decided to start in the first place. I’m glad to say that, at least at church, more typically the answer is that we decided to do a project because we wanted to serve others or we decided to do an event to connect with others. We opted to hold a particular class because we wanted to help all of us grow in our faith or deepen it.
As people of faith, we distill a lot of the good news of Jesus into: “Love God & love others.” There is our why – that is our intention. We want to go about our days loving God and loving the other people who are in our lives. Super simple to say but more challenging to actually do - especially the part about loving others. People can be tricky and so our intentions of loving them get a little lost.
This weekend, we will have the opportunity to put our intentions into action and love others well. We will assemble hygiene kits for UMCOR (the United Methodist Committee on Relief) on the patio after service. We will use our hands to put washcloths, combs, toothbrushes and more into bundles that will ultimately land in the hands of someone in some sort of disaster (be that natural or human-created). These kits start off here and may end up on the other side of the globe.
You all have stepped up already to show that love: the boxes bearing all the supplies have been arriving! Nail clippers, hand towels and toothbrushes, oh my! You have already extended your hands in love to others. And then on Sunday, more hands will show up, and we will put the kits together and in this small way, we will love others well. These kits carry our love and become a tangible reminder that not only do we love the hands that will receive them – God loves and sees them even in crises.
We may not always make it to our intentions of loving, but we will keep trying. And when we serve others, I think we hit the mark on loving others well.
